DeLoreans Have It Easy
by dblauvelt
Summary: Zoe gets called back to assist with one of her side projects in stellar engineering that has gone disastrously wrong...
1. Chapter 1

Giving birth to a star was always such a pain in the ass.

Zoe Herriot was plugged directly into the Incubator's system, immersed in its virtual world. She had designed the Incubators years ago in order to help fund some of her more esoteric research projects in the Rippleverses. She had cobbled together three of the Incubator devices and sold them off to one of the larger corporations and had more or less forgotten about them.

That had been twenty years ago. A lifetime. Well, several in fact. Her last partner had warned her about the dangers of cloning and cellular regeneration but there was so much work that needed to do and only one of her so something had been done. But that was a story for another time and indeed an entire series on a rather low-rated interstellar vid network set in the Weberlands.

Now, as Zoe scanned equations and dove into the flotsam and jetsam of code that she had written so long ago - some of which was familiar while others were so complex and foreign that she couldn't believe that she'd ever written them - she was more than a little concerned.

The fact that the Incubator's systems had gained some degree of sentience was fine, almost comforting in fact. She'd allowed for that and build in redundancies to ensure that should this happen, it could actually help the performance of the birthing systems. The Incubator had sent an avatar to help her, visualizing itself as a small butterfly that flitted about beside her in puterspace. It was courteous, shy had introduced itself as Tony and unfortunately was not in any way the problem.

Zoe somewhat missed dealing with malignant artificial intelligences bent on universal devastation. Those were easy.

This was something quite different.

The company had purchased her stellar manipulator system to do the usual, if somewhat repugnant, things corporations did: claimed that they were doing advanced scientific research to create patents but in reality just pumping out stars in order to build designer asterisms for the purpose of advertising, like spelling out the motto '_Drink Flurgg and Feel Fine_'. While somewhat annoyed at the marketing executives, as long as no one was in anyway harmed in the process, Zoe honestly didn't give a flying flurgg one way or the other what they did with her tech.

She'd only agreed to come back and help troubleshoot the system because what the Incubator was doing now was far more interesting.

If somewhat alarming.

Any idiot could build a star, Zoe had always maintained during meeting with the corporations executives, despite the odd looks she'd get. You just needed hydrogen. Admittedly, a great deal of it, but hydrogen was not only incredibly cheap but also very easy to make. Then simply throw in some helium and trace elements for seasoning. Once thermonuclear fusion kicked in, drop the mike you're done. You could pretty much walk away and then just keep your fingers crossed they just faded away in a degenerate way, and not the exploding supernovae way.

The tricky part is simply the time it takes for the hydrogen to reach critical mass to begin conversion to helium. So Zoe had just cobbled together a few chronosleds and slapped them onto the Incubators in order to accelerate the initial 'bang' as it were. Easy as 3.141592653… and so on.

Now, however, the Incubator was birthing suns that contained a quite peculiar coronae harmonics and she couldn't figure out why she was unable shut the damn thing off…

The corporation was understandably a bit concerned that the Incubators were now churning out approximately two hundred thousand stars every hour. Not only could Zoe not work out where the hydrogen was coming from, the resultant mass was starting to do very peculiar things to localized space.

And then of course, there was the question of just exactly where the stars were going… even now as she watched on the virtual display with Tony floating by her side, she could see the masses of stars dropping out of existence.

Zoe had a nasty feeling that this was not in any way a good thing.


	2. Chapter 2

It had been such a long time.

He wasn't quite sure if he knew how to do it anymore.

Staring at the panel in front of him… nothing was coming to him.

The emptiness inside him ached.

He knew he _used_ to know.

Or at least he thought he did. Thought he had?

Thoughts were hard.

Breathing was hard. No – not hard, odd. Larger lungs? Smaller lungs, deeper breaths?

Like inhaling on a sharp winter day and the crisp, cold air hit new cells, new hairs, new – well, new everything.

The freshness of first breaths in a new body. Intoxicating.

Thumping.

Thumping.

Someone was thumping his arm.

Screaming.

Small human female. Loud. Terrified. Probable eating disorder.

Oh yes. Crashing.

Crashing again.

Now that was familiar.

Crashing.

Last time. Also crashing. Coincidence?

New body, small death. Ship's link severed, until re-established… Chaos. Ship uncertain how to reconnect. In pain. Throes. Mourning.

More thumping.

Not the only one in pain.

Pain… solution = anesthetic. None available. Secondary alternative = put the patient to sleep.

But how?

His eyes found a sticky note, as he supposed he was intended to, with the words 'Press Here' scribbled in green ink. The handwriting was terribly familiar. He pressed the button. There was a lurch and rending screech of the engines before everything stopped as the Ship released its grip on space/time.

And the Ship fell - quite literally - to sleep.

As the floor rushed away from him, he supposed it would have been wise to have held on to something.

Still…

At least the thumping had stopped.


	3. Chapter 3

Clara was running.

_Aren't I always? _

She sprinted down through the corridors of an abandoned warehouse _corridors, always corridors_ something was chasing her. Something unbelievable. Something terrible.

Darkness was everywhere. Gray daubs of moonlight that seeped through rents in the tattered drywall splattered upon the concrete floor and smeared the walls. She could barely make out the way before her. Behind her there was panting, thumping of feet and the relentless gasps of something horrid close on her heels.

_Heels, for God's sake._

_Why do I keep wearing heels?_

Clara turned a tight corner, gripping the wall edge to swing herself round the bend faster, the plaster crumbling under her grip as she did so. There was a light ahead at the end of this corner, artificial light, giving her hope, giving her speed.

She remembered the Doctor glowing, changing, then snap, a new whole new person. A prickly, angry person with hair like a steel brush and wrinkles, severe and dark. Then they were crashing, and darkness, and burning and then she was running, here running, breathless, exhausted and finally stumbling into the light, collapsing as the brutal weight the impossible beast pinned her to the ground-

**Slap**

**Slap**

**Slap**

-she heard above her, followed by some rather disgusting thumps and wet, slapping sounds.

"Cerebus?" a deep, husky voice.

"Looks like," replied another. 'Must be a Wednesday."

There was a sound of blades being sheathed.

A strong but surprisingly gentle hand took Clara's arm and helped her to her feet. Her eyes wincing in the bright fluorescent lights as she struggled to take in her surroundings

"A hellhound, I'm okay with," said Husky. "But Cerebus the GateKeeper of Hell?'

"Be grateful,' admonished another, his words so low they were almost a whisper "at least this one was visible. You okay miss – woah… hello."

Clara had adjusted to the lights, but felt a bit overwhelmed by his gaze. She found her jaw bobbing up and down stupidly as she tried to retrieve nouns, pronouns, verbs and things.

"Evening," he continued, "I'm Dean and that's… well, never mind him."

"Sam," corrected Husky. "I'm Sam Winchester. Are you okay?"

Clara finally found the ability to create sounds again, but made the mistake of looking down – at the decapitated three heads of the hound that had hunted her - all she could manage was a long groan.


	4. Chapter 4

The Doctor blinked.

Then had to blink again.

There was no change.

Everything was deeply wrong.

The sky was gunmetal gray, which was fine, nothing terribly odd in that. After all, according to his nose he seemed to have landed on a beach along the North Sea. He sat up. The dark gray water, murky, foamy, also fine, although perhaps disturbing for other reasons.

All that was fine.

No. It was the fact that the scrub along the sand, the trees, the clouds, the sand, his hand – everything was different shades of gray. He rubbed his eyes, dug in the sand, pulled out the lining in his pocket – still gray. Gray all around. Gray and coarse, as if he was stuck in an old photograph…

He stood up, wet sand clinging to his trousers and hands. To his left there was a large gray pipeline led from the sea up to the beach. He squinted, but the gray remained. Frustrated he ran his fingers through is mop of curls before remembering the grit. Cursing, he moved closer and was able to make out the edges of a logo obscured by seaweed. He crouched down, picked up a short stick of driftwood and slid a wet gray mass of seaweed aside to read the words: _Euro Sea Gas_.

It was all terribly familiar.

Voices carried above the battering waves of the surf. He popped his head up over the pipe– there were three figures on the beach, a young woman and a middle aged couple standing at a distance behind her. To his astonishment, two men were splashing through the surf towards a tall gray police box. One wore a kilt, the other a rumpled frock coat. They stepped into the dark gray box and it faded away.

The Doctor ducked back down behind the pipe, lest he be seen.

So many timelines, so much damage.

Unless he was in a memory which would explain the monochrome world around him.

Regenerations were tricky things. Once he had woken up and someone had body swapped his companion on him. He shuddered. And the less said about San Francisco, the better. He wasn't sure which held more horrible things: his memories or his imagination.

He peered above the pipeline again and saw the figures fading as they walked along the beach.

Fading. Actually fading.

The Doctor held up his hands – new old hands, wrinkled ones with veins and spots and blotches and they were fading too…

Blackness swallowed him.

The world was gone.

There was only silence.

Blackness, and gaping seething light that churned and bled around him, engulfing, and the sound, the sounds threatened to overwhelm him.

Then he was on a plain, his eyes aching in the white sunlight. Voices and the clash of metal on metal were close by. He instinctively crouched, finding himself behind a bush – a gray one of course - cover but not much by any means.

"Over here, stable keeper. Barbarian horse worshipper!"

The shouting was close now, he could hear the panting of breath, each clatter of hardened steel.

Another voice, deeper, darker but the timbre playful. Deadly, but playful. "Out of breath so soon, my light-foot princeling? Your friend Petrocolus fled me further, and made better sport!"

Petrocolus?

Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear.

The Doctor squatted deeper into the dusty sands of the plain, desperate to conceal himself. Memories were cascading into his head, missing places and time thudding into his skull.

Momentarily, for the very briefest of moments that he would never again admit to, the Doctor blacked out.

"Beware the voice of Zeus, Hector. Beware the anger of Olympus."

Coming to, still groggy, the Doctor made himself watch what he knew was going to happen next.

"Oh, I do not fear the thunder, you superstitious, dark-dodging decadent!" It was Hector, as he remembered him, from so long ago, on the plain of Troy, about to slaughter Achilles. "Hear me, Zeus! Accept from me the promised life of your cringing servant Achilles! Or else, I challenge you. Descend to Earth and save him!" Hector lunged at Achilles to deal the death blow.

It was of course, at that point that the Doctor watched a younger, yet older, gray hued version of himself step out from the dark gray Tardis and on to the plains of Troy.

"Zeus!" Exclaimed Hector, "Forgive me!" 

"Zeus, indeed," the Doctor muttered under his breath as he ducked back down behind the bush, "if only. A power mad Olympian I could handle… this…?" He stared at his hands again that were no longer his, no longer his young hands, hands he knew, hands and fingers and whorls that he knew, that he'd used, that had been with him for a lifetime, and yet were no more.

He was confused, lost, alone and no longer in his right body. Or mind.

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	5. Chapter 5

"I said, I'm Dean and this is my brother Sam…"

Clara found that she was still blinking stupidly. "Oh believe me I know."

"Have we met?"

"Not exactly," Clara found herself unable to meet his ridiculously piercing eyes, "but we've certainly had a rather unhealthy relationship since I was about fourteen…" she finished under her breath. "I'm Clara, Clara Oswald," she stuck out an arm and awkwardly shook their hands, trying to ignore the blood and gore upon returned palms.

"You seem more bothered by us than the hellbeast,"Sam noted, gesturing to the corpse at her feet.

"No, no," Clara said quickly, "Monsters, terrible, awful… I mean blood… yuck and all… where to begin?" Clara babbled, circling the triple headed dog's carcass to buy time, her mind reeling with the usual WhoWhatWhereWhyHow crap, and why was there an H? Surely it should start with a W as well? "Wow."

The brothers were looking at her oddly again.

She knelt by the blooding neck and made a show of examining the wound. "Great cut, severed quite cleanly all the way through." Despite her previous causal remarks, now that she was nose to stump, it was a bit more gruesome than she was accustomed to – focus, focus, focus. Who = unknown who landed me here with the Supernatural dream boats, although I think we can guess Who is always responsible, What= does that even apply? Where…

"Where are we?" she asked, standing up and wiping her sullied hands upon her trousers.

Sam frowned at her. "East side."

"East side?" Clara tried not to focus on Sam's rumpled handsome brow, the dark eyes, - or the shoulders that could fit three of her in an embrace. "East of…"

She was in a land where television characters where real. The Doctor had told her stories of the Lands of Fiction, although she was never sure she believed such a place was needed given the number of fictional character's he'd introduced her to in her 'real world'. Yet her she was, in a horror/comedy/geek television show being protected by these two incredibly attractive… well, things could be worse. Far, far worse.

Clara started to realize that Sam's frown and furrowed brow were deepening the longer she stared. She raised her hands showing that she was unarmed. "Look, I'm sorry, I'm just lost. I was with someone somewhere completely different and then suddenly I was here, running with that, that–," she waved at the beast, "trying to have me for dinner. I really, honestly don't know where I am or what's going on."

"Sammy, Cass wasn't exactly heavy on the details, we don't know if there are any more surprises on their way." Dean picked up his blade and headed for a door. "We can play twenty questions with brit chick somewhere safer."

"Right, come'on," Sammy gently took Clara by the arm to follow after his brother.

"Oh," Dean stopped, turning and fumbling in his pocket with his free hand. "Just one thing."

Clara gasped as he doused warm water all over her face.

"Just checking," Dean winked as he tucked a battered flask into his jacket.

Clara found herself grinning back. She really should have expected that. Splashed with holy water by Dean Winchester. Mind, she reminded herself, their supporting cast tended to never last very long. Hopefully she could find the Doctor and get out of here before that became an issue. She knew the rules here, she knew the cast, familiar ground. She could handle this.

"Dean!" Sam grabbed his brother by the arm. "You're bleeding!" He examined the gash in his brother's jacket, a red wound that seeped through just under his left shoulder.

"Nah," Dean shrugged him away, then winced. "Just a scratch."

"You idiot," Sam pulled his brother back into the glare of the warehouse lights. "We talked about this, no more lies." He gently twisted his brother's arm so he could put pressure on the wound with his palm.

"Yeah, yeah, Sammy, I'm fine, let's go." Dean tried to squirm away.

"I'm serious Dean. Look at me," Sam placed a hand on each head and forced his brother to meet his gaze.

Clara could feel the tension in the air, fierce and alive like the crackle of invisible electricity, like something awful was about to happen.

Sammy was stared unblinking into Dean's eyes. "I can't lose you again. Not again."

Clara knew then, knew where she was, even as her eyes took in the two brothers, as her mind tried to comprehend.

Clara looked on with horror and sadness as the two brothers kissed passionately, open mouthed and hungry.

Clara wasn't in the Land of Fiction… she was in the Land of Fanfiction.

And there was nowhere to run.


End file.
